7 Mind Blowing Special Effects You Won't Believe Aren't CGI .
When I first found this Article I was amazed after reading this. And I have no issues in creating redundancy, with this being the post
Computer generated images are like the foam sets of the present era: 20 years from now, people are going to laugh their asses off at the fact that this stuff looked even remotely real to us.
#7. The Lord Of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring -- Little Hobbit, Big Gandalf
Here's an effect so seamless that you probably never gave it a second thought during the 27-hour runtime of the Lord of the Rings trilogy: the fact that Elijah Wood and the other actors playing hobbits are not in fact three feet tall.
The camera takes off ... a few feet.
Ah, but who cares, right? With CGI, you can probably just click on an actor and tell the computer to shrink him by 50 percent and you're done. Right?
"Bam. Hobbits. Give me 20 minutes and a chimp and I'll give you King Kong."
Not if you don't want it to look like shit. It's one thing if the actor is just standing next to the normal-size characters in a field, but at various points in the trilogy, you see Gandalf grab the tiny Frodo, hug him, ride on the same carriage with him and sit down at the same table. To pull that off Peter Jackson, needed a buffet of effects techniques ranging from simple to insane.
Sometimes it was as easy as using a child in a Frodo wig shot from behind ...
... or just compositing the actors together from different shots, or digitally sticking Frodo's face onto a tiny double. But the coolest effects didn't involve any computers or green-screen trickery at all. It's called "forced perspective."
Or Hobbitvision.
The idea is that you put one actor really far from the camera and the other one really close to the camera, then shoot at such an angle that it appears they are next to each other and that one of them is really big and the other really small. Which sounds simple, until you realize that you need to build everything on the set so that the actors can interact with it at the same time while hiding the fact that they're far away from each other.
The simplest example is with Gandalf's cart. In the movie, you see them sitting side by side ...
... but the real cart is built so that if the camera is stuck in that spot, it hides the fact that Frodo is actually sitting about four feet behind Gandalf, with Ian McKellen's body hiding where the bench is split:
But the complication comes when you realize that this works only if the camera remains perfectly still. So any shot where the camera moves around has to involve a computer, right? Nope. In scenes like this one, where they share a table ...
... they are actually sitting at two different tables, one human-sized and one hobbit-sized ...
... that are made in such a way that each piece slowly turns with the camera, so that the whole time, they appear to be one simple table, shifting with the perspective of the viewer. This required that the camera be put on a motion-control rig and half of the set be put on another rig that completely counteracted the movement of the camera. So when the shot moved, the set, props and even the actors moved accordingly (yes, while McKellen was trying to stay in character as Gandalf, he was on a stool that was slowly scooting him around the room).
"It's a little bit trippy when you've had too much pipe weed."
Take a moment to think about the crew that put that together, knowing the final goal was for you to never notice it.
#6. Inception -- The Dream Collapsing
Inception is one of those movies that could have easily gotten away with doing every single special effect in CGI, because it's full of so many insane moments that we assume half the things in it are computer generated anyway (for example, there's no evidence that Ken Watanabe is a real person). Like in the scene where water comes rushing in through the windows of the Japanese dream castle while DiCaprio watches:
They had huge water cannons hiding outside the windows, firing somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 gallons into the set as DiCaprio stood there, soaking wet.
"Finally, I can pee in public and no one will know!"
Don't think DiCaprio got to have all the fun, though -- if there's one scene that screams "CGI," that would be the iconic hallway fight scene where Joseph Gordon-Levitt climbs up walls and runs through the ceiling as if gravity had taken a break:
Meanwhile, four exceptionally heavy sleepers rest inside a flying van.
But nope, that's all real, too. Doing the scene with wires and erasing them digitally would have been too easy, apparently, so Christopher Nolan actually built a 100-foot-long rotating hallway and locked down the camera to rotate with it, effectively making it look like the actors were defying gravity.
Christopher Nolan is what happens when a child goes his whole life without learning the word "reasonable."
So what about when DiCaprio and Ellen Page are sitting in a cafe in Paris and he reveals that she's actually dreaming, and then everything explodes around them?
"You didn't have Mexican food before going to sleep by any chance, did you?"
You'd think from how cool the actors seem in that scene that they were actually sitting comfortably in front of a green screen, but that explosion is real -- the filmmakers put air cannons inside the cafe and in the stands across the street, then blew everything to shit around DiCaprio and Page. You can see their "Oh shit" faces here:
Via msmariah.com"Honestly, the whole production was just an expensive excuse to shoot garbage at Leo. He spilled something on me one time."
#5. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol -- Climbing the Highest Man-Made Structure in the World
Tom Cruise has a reputation for being insane (even by Scientology standards), but oddly enough, that has rarely translated into accusations that he's hard to work with. In fact, the "making of" featurettes for his Mission: Impossible movies are often as much if not more entertaining than the movies themselves, precisely because he's insane. Case in point:
That's a real photo of Cruise on top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest man-made structure in the world, during the production of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. If you've seen the film, you know that Cruise climbs the building -- what you might not be aware of is that he literally climbed the damned building.
When the production team saw that the script called for Cruise's character to perform some stunts outside the Burj Khalifa, they immediately started working on re-creating part of the building inside a soundstage, which they could then digitally combine with the real thing, because they just assumed that no one would be crazy enough to actually want to climb it. It took a single meeting with Cruise to prove them wrong -- turns out he'd had his eye on the building for some time and wanted to make it his bitch.
As usual, Cruise insisted on doing this without any stunt doubles, even though shooting the scene required being strapped into a painful harness and hung like a freaking pinata against glass that became so hot that it was impossible to shoot under direct sunlight. The film crew set up camp in the unfinished 123rd floor of the tower and had to remove a bunch of windows so they could stick out all the necessary equipment to film Cruise's stunts and, you know, keep him alive and stuff.
One stunt even involved running down the face of the building in order to stealthily break into one of the floors ... because nothing says stealth mission like hanging off a building in the middle of the day.
#4. Alien: Resurrection -- Ripley Makes a Perfect Shot
Alien: Resurrection got a lot of crap for its use of (bad) CGI aliens, when in fact most of the movie was done with good old-fashioned puppets and model spaceships. For example, the gruesome scene where the human/ alien hybrid is sucked into space through a tiny hole in the spaceship ...
And yet Ron Perlman is still the ugliest thing in this movie.
... was done entirely on set by creating plastic replicas of the creature and then literally pulling them through a hole.
However, the coolest moment in the movie needed no puppets or effects at all. In one scene, Sigourney Weaver is playing basketball in the ship's gym when Ron Perlman and his posse show up and start giving her shit. Weaver proceeds to kick their asses and walks away -- but not before performing an impossible over-the-head blind shot resulting in nothing but net.
Wasn't this exact scene in Teen Wolf?
That's the real thing there. Originally, the director wanted to fake the shot using CGI or having someone else drop the ball from above, since he wasn't looking forward to doing 200 takes until they got one right, but Weaver insisted on doing it herself. The crew went along with it, the whole time assuming that they'd have to eventually CG a ball in during postproduction. But then, to everyone's surprise, Weaver got it on her sixth try.
In fact, in the unedited footage, you can see that Perlman almost blew the entire shot by breaking character and going "Oh my God" after the ball goes through. That's why the movie cuts away to a different reaction shot so quickly after that part.
They could have just left the original and dubbed his voice saying, "Well, that sucked."
#3 The Dark Knight -- The Big Chase Scene
It was a chase that destroyed the Batmobile, a Joker-themed semi, a dump truck, a paddy wagon, multiple cop cars and God knows how many bystander vehicles. And that shit was worth it.
Two specific points during the insane car chase at the halfway point of The Dark Knight are so over-the-top they seem like they would have had to be computer-generated, if for no other reason than they would have killed the stunt drivers.
The first is when the Batmobile first shows up to take out the Joker's convoy. It speeds in ...
... and offers what equates to a vehicular uppercut to a garbage truck.
The scene ended up in the trailer and inadvertently encouraged a bloat of fanboys to flock to their keyboards and pound out protests against the fake-looking CGI in the movie. But as Christopher Nolan has proved time and again, he doesn't mess with that shit if he doesn't have to.
No, what you are actually seeing there is a complete one-third-scale model of the Batmobile, the garbage truck and a large section of lower Wacker Drive in Chicago.
Even the damn 180-degree move that the Batmobile pulls off at the end was done by a radio-controlled model.
So what about the climactic moment in that scene when they flip the Joker's 18-wheeler after Batman clotheslines it with a grappling hook? If that was a model, it was pretty goddamned convincing.
The flipping of the semi was accomplished with a technique known in Hollywood as flipping a real goddamned semi. To get the mind-boggling amount of upward force needed to lift the big bastard head over heels, the FX crew built a huge steam-piston mechanism in the trailer.
Wait, why can't that shit come standard in cars now?
Of course, then the challenge was to make it look like this insane stunt was occurring right in the middle of the banking district in Gotham. So how the hell do you pull that off? Build a miniature city and edit in the truck somehow? Film the truck out on an open course and use CGI to fill in the background? Shit, no! They just went to downtown Chicago, closed off a street and flipped their goddamned semi.
Why? Because that's how Batman would do it.
CGI is for squares.
#2 Terminator 2: Judgment Day -- Digging Into the Terminator's Brain
We have previously pointed out how few of the effects in Terminator 2 were CGI, even though the computer-generated morphing of the T-1000 from liquid metal to Robert Patrick is all anyone talked about at the time. The vast majority of what you saw on the screen involved good old-fashioned makeup, models and trickery by FX wizard Stan Winston.
Linda Hamilton's biceps also played a substantial role in the magic.
Maybe the best example of the mind-boggling ingenuity that goes into any "I can't believe it's not CGI" scene is one that was cut from this film (a scene which, as we explained in the past, fills in a pretty big plot hole). The scene shows Sarah and John Connor opening up the Terminator's head to extract and reboot his CPU, giving him the ability to learn and adapt easier.
In a single take, we see the back of the Terminator's head in the foreground and his face reflected in the mirror in the background, clearly showing Arnold's un-animatronic likeness talking and emoting.
As much as one expects Arnold Schwarzenegger to emote ...
As they unscrew his dome, the camera moves around until the shot finally ends on the top of the non-reflected Terminator head, which is opened up like a damn pickle jar.
Now those of you who are experts in Arnold Schwarzenegger trivia already know that the man does not have a giant hole in his brain. So, what, they just had a fake head in the foreground and used CGI to put a fake reflection in the mirror? Easy!
Uh, no. There is no mirror. It's a window. On opposite sides are two John and Sarah Connors, and two Terminators miming each other's movements exactly so that they would appear to be reflected in a mirror.
But wait -- something doesn't quite add up. That's clearly Sarah Connor in both the foreground and the reflection ... what gives? It's not like there are two Linda Hamiltons out there.
Oh.
Meet Leslie Hamilton, Linda's identical twin sister. She came in quite handy during the making of this film, especially when the T-1000 took on Sarah Connor's form.
Yep, for all that you heard about the groundbreaking CGI, it all came down to identical-twin shenanigans. Basically, a special effects version of The Parent Trap.
#1.
Escape From New York -- 3D NYC
You're probably wondering how anything from a film made in 1981 could possibly be confused as CGI. Well, they did have computer-generated images back then; they just looked terrible. Like this shot, which is supposed to be from Snake's glider's computer as he is descending on the futuristic apocalyptic cityscape that is 1997 New York City:
See? 80s graphics, man.
Believe it or not, what you see there was extremely cutting-edge for the time. In fact, it was so cutting-edge that it was completely out of the question given the film's budget. But John Carpenter wanted this high-tech graphic to appear in the film -- after all, it's supposed to be 1997! So they had to find a way to do that shot of computer graphics without using computer graphics.
For the sequel, they had to find a way to do the whole film without using a plot.
So they grabbed their model of New York, which had been used for various other shots, and bought a roll of green tape and a black light. That's it -- this cutting-edge effect was done with five bucks and a trip to the hardware store.
Also, we think there was a tiny guy with a tiny roll of tape inside every Virtual Boy.
David Bell is a freelance writer and video editor. You can read some of his work here.
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